Stay away from the Asus prime x370 board. Ive had a ton of issues not including the overclocking dramas. Currently experiencing USB problems... not sure if its windows but I am getting a little over chasing gremlins.

When i get a new PC I'll probably be looking at 8 to 16 CORES at the lowest TDP running an i3 6100T 35w CPU at the moment .. 8 cores at 65w or 12 cores at 125w sounds good with Threadripper

Buy what you can afford and factor in heat in summer and running costs I really like the G-skill Trident RGB DDR4 ram sticks.. they look amazing .. grabbed two packs of 16GB DDR4 3000Mhz for $199 each .. running them in the intel boxes at the moment but will move all 32GB's to a Ryzen system in the future

i got a good deal on a 1600x so i,m grabbing the asrock b350 pro 4 for $119 from pccasegear seems to be a nice simple board that works ok but also has 4 ram slots.

what you really really want to watch for those is vrm cooling make sure it at least has some for of heat sinks.

ram wis ei would seriously suggest grabbing some of the gskill ryzen based ram like the flare x or fortis depending on what you want to spend and how much you want to tweak.

i finally gave up on corsair and team extreme and plonked down the fir the flarex 3200(way overpriced but i have had quite enough tweaking for now plus when threadripper drops i will only need to grab another one and be happy.

be sure you get an am4 based cooler as well(if you are not getting a 1600/1700 with the cooler)

To play devils advocate, if your main use case is gaming, you'll still get better performance out of an i7 7700k for similar money in the majority of games. So consider that.

That said, I'd suggest the 1600. It'll OC the same as the 1700, it'll perform the same in the vast majority of games. It will perform better than the 7700k in games that are better multithreaded which will hopefully be increasingly common as intel also looks toward 6+ cores, and won't bottleneck your GPU on games that aren't. Plus you have a better upgrade path since you'll have zen2 and 7nm CPUs most likely still on AM4 (hopefully actually supported by current motherboards).

With that advice though and in much the same situation I bought myself a 1700. My reason:
- ePeen, dank cores bra. Seeing those 16 threads in task manager just makes me feel happy.
- More threads is useful for me as I run a lot of background tasks while I game. I want to still have torrents going, and a youtube video on the other screen, while my media server streams a movie to the TV for my wife.

I also went with x370 rather than b350 mostly for epeen reasons and because I wanted to reuse my AM3 cooler and couldn't get an AM4 bracket. Asus Crosshair VI. Running gskill flarex 3200mhz happily. Haven't tinkered with the CPU yet but will when I get the time. The rams pretty pricey and with better research than I put in I'm sure you could find an alternative to run the same speed for cheaper, but I was willing to just throw some extra cash to save me time.

I havent pushed my system for anything other than gaming for which is usually nearly every evening for anything upto or more than 5hours. I have only recently done a preset 4ghz overclock as well.

Would it be better that I purchase a new PSU? I am hoping to not spend too much and if I could use some previous system parts that would be great. I will for now use my R9 290 as well and hold out for vega gaming card to go on sale later at the end of the year or even just grab a 1080ti close to its end of life as I will be running this on a 3440x1440 res display.

I want to upgrade to a Ryzen 1600x or above, purely for gaming and streaming. Maybe in the future some video editing but probably just editing of recorded streams, nothing too fancy.

I don't see any reason to upgrade the PSU. You'll be hard pressed to push it anywhere near 850w, its a gold rated, quality PSU. Hell your new ryzen system will probably draw less power especially when you replace the 290. Not that there's any rush for that, they've aged quite well.

The only reason to upgrade really, is if it doesn't supply the plugs that you want to use. For example, my motherboard can take the usual 8pin plug and an additional 4pin optionally. My PSU is too old to have that extra 4pin. So I guess if I really wanted to push the OC hard I'd want a new PSU. But it works fine.

Interest in streaming is where I'd consider the 1700 over the 1600. You'll use the extra cores.

I havent pushed my system for anything other than gaming for which is usually nearly every evening for anything upto or more than 5hours. I have only recently done a preset 4ghz overclock as well.

Would it be better that I purchase a new PSU? I am hoping to not spend too much and if I could use some previous system parts that would be great. I will for now use my R9 290 as well and hold out for vega gaming card to go on sale later at the end of the year or even just grab a 1080ti close to its end of life as I will be running this on a 3440x1440 res display.

I want to upgrade to a Ryzen 1600x or above, purely for gaming and streaming. Maybe in the future some video editing but probably just editing of recorded streams, nothing too fancy.

I am now contemplating if I should get the planned 1700 or just grab a 1600x or non-x.

I mainly will just be using it for gaming and will do some streaming. Until I get a decent connection for upload which probably will be 2020 when NBN is done here. I just from time to time stream off my mobile since I have heaps of unused data there.

Would the 6 core be more than capable of streaming and using high settings on OBS? the price difference is less than $100 though for from 6 to 8cores T_T

My son and I both have Ryzen 1600 now..and he does stream Escape From Tarkov and it does a great job. As for gaming on the 1600 for me its working quite well after upgrading / sidegrading from an i5-4690k.. minimum frames are better and some games seem much smoother now. I think i should have gone for faster ram than the 2666mhz that I got but I can always change that later.